


Notes of Oak, Cherry, Boredom and Bullshit

by merriman



Category: Ocean's (Movies)
Genre: Heist, Laying low, M/M, Wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:10:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8875414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: Make a plan, get in trouble, lay low. It's a tried and true way to spend a vacation for Danny and Rusty.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GotTheSilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GotTheSilver/gifts).



> Thank you to a wonderful chat denizen for the title help.
> 
> Thank you to A for beta help.
> 
> Thank you to a random tumblr post about art fraud linking to some articles on wine fraud. What a wild read.

"How's life in the suburbs?" Rusty asked Danny when he opened the door of the hotel suite he was currently occupying. Danny just grimaced and edged past Rusty.

It was fairly decent inside. A hotel suite, sure, but a hotel suite in a hotel Rusty himself owned. A suite he shared with a woman used to not living in a hovel. He'd lived in worse places, Danny knew. They both had. All things considered, this was quite nice.

"Life in the suburbs would be fine, if we were still in the suburbs," he told Rusty once he was settled on the couch. "Tess got a job in Boston. We're moving. Well, she's moving. I'm getting out of her hair."

"Did you volunteer for that or were you dismissed?" Rusty asked, leaning himself against the kitchen island and grabbing a beer. He tossed it to Danny, then got one for himself.

"I was told, in no uncertain terms, to make myself scarce," Danny said. "I believe her exact words were 'Just go pester Rusty for a week and meet me in Boston when we're moved.'"

"So you're my problem for a week?" Rusty asked. "A whole week? Whatever shall we do?"

Danny grinned at him. Rusty grinned back. Was there ever any question about what they'd do when they got together? They'd had a routine down since before they'd even started pulling jobs with each other: Make a plan, get in trouble, lay low. Every so often they could avoid the getting in trouble part, but laying low was always fun no matter whether it was necessary or not. Laying low was tradition. And a hotel suite to themselves for a week was definitely going to bring on the nostalgia.

"How's Isabel?" Danny asked. The unspoken question being 'Will Isabel mind that we're probably going to break a few laws this week? Will she also mind that I'm staying with you?'

"Oh, she's great. Visiting her father for a month. She told me not to get in too much trouble while she was gone."

"How much is too much?" Danny asked.

"Arrested?" Rusty ventured. "She knew you were visiting. She left you a note." He gestured with his bottle, indicating a folded piece of paper on the coffee table. 

It wasn't even worth asking if Rusty had read it. Of course he'd read it. It could have been sealed, with wax, and he'd have read it anyhow and it would have looked perfect. Which was probably why Isabel hadn't bothered to even put it in an envelope. After a few years around not just Rusty but Danny and their assorted ne'er-do-well friends, Isabel knew well enough how they operated. If it didn't need to be a secret, why make it look tempting?

Danny picked up the note and unfolded it.

> Danny,  
> Get him arrested and I will get you arrested and you will not be cellmates, I assure you.
> 
> Take him out for dinner. It's the least you can do before sleeping with him and he's probably been living off of Chinese takeaway since I left.
> 
> -Isabel

Danny re-folded the note and set it down on the coffee table where he'd found it. They both sat and looked at it, then Danny nodded.

"Right. The lady says I should buy you dinner."

"Such a gentleman," Rusty said, finishing his beer and leaving the bottle. "I want a steak. Let's go."

* * *

Rusty did not order the biggest steak on the menu. Neither did Danny. Huge steaks were for intimidation and last meals before jail and first meals out of jail. They were for birthdays if you wanted to get fancy. But even then, it was more a matter of ordering one because you could, not because you really wanted to eat half a cow.

What Rusty did order was a smaller steak, medium rare, topped with a garlic butter that was currently dripping its way down the side of his hand while he paused, fork held up, listening to Danny explain how they had to make sure to keep their noses clean on the East coast now. And Danny was very sure what he'd been saying was important. It had to do with Tess and how she was working at a museum that had already had a high-profile theft that would probably never get solved and how the last thing they wanted to do was cause her trouble now. But there was that drip of butter. Danny trailed off, his own theories on the theft left unspoken as he watched the butter until it dripped right off Rusty's hand.

"Right. So. No art heists from museums in Boston. Got it," Rusty said, finally eating that cube of steak and then licking the remainder of the butter off his hand. "Not really our thing, anyhow."

"Yeah." Danny blinked and shook his head a little to clear it. "Though really, I'm not morally opposed to it, just seems a little, you know, uncouth, to steal from a public museum."

Rusty shrugged, grinning at him. Of course they'd both stolen from museums in the past, but usually they stuck to private collections. It was more interesting and more often than not, the private collectors had acquired a fair number of their pieces through somewhat unscrupulous means.

"Anyhow, just so it's settled."

"It's settled," Rusty assured him. And there was another drip of butter. It was so damn distracting. 

"I've got a better idea anyhow," Danny said, tearing his eyes off the butter and looking at Rusty's face - which wasn't really much help. Rusty was still grinning and Danny was notoriously bad at resisting that grin. 

Rusty motioned with his fork for Danny to continue.

"Okay, so I was talking to some of the other guys in the neighborhood," he started.

"In the suburbs," Rusty clarified. Danny rolled his eyes and continued.

"Yes, in the suburbs. They weren't that bad, but you know, none of them could play poker worth a damn. So I was making a mint off them playing cards every Tuesday and one of them started talking about how he's taking this wine tasting course and he's practically an expert now."

"Bullshit," Rusty said without really interrupting.

"Oh yeah," Danny agreed. "But my point is, this is a thing now. Folks taking wine tasting classes, thinking they're experts. Even folks with money don't know what the hell they're talking about. So I was thinking maybe we could file that away for later."

"I know some folks," Rusty said. "We could pull it off. Let's keep it on the list." The list consisting of any job they'd ever contemplated but shelved for another time. They both kept track of it in their heads - no use in implicating themselves if someone ever found anything written down. Some day they might even get around to this one. It seemed like it might be fun. But it was more of a long term con, not something to pull off in a week or less.

For now, Rusty was pushing his last piece of steak around his plate, mopping up the butter and looking thoughtful about something.

"You done?" Danny asked him. "Or did you want dessert too?"

"I've got popsicles back at the hotel," Rusty told him. Danny just smiled and called a waiter over to ask for the check.

* * *

There were indeed popsicles back at the hotel, but neither Rusty nor Danny ate any. Rusty did get one out, then left it to melt on the counter when Danny kissed him, pinning him against the wall by the fridge. They managed to move from the wall in the kitchen to the wall in the main room before Rusty pulled away and dragged Danny into the bedroom. They weren't teenagers anymore. It wasn't like they could just go at it against the kitchen counter like they had when they were younger. Or wanted to. There was nothing wrong with a nice bed when it was available and Rusty had not skimped on the mattresses in his hotel.

"I've got to run out," Rusty said a few hours later. He was already getting dressed and Danny was still in bed. 

"If you get arrested while you're alone it's not my fault and I'm not taking the heat from Isabel," Danny warned. "You're on your own."

"I'm just dealing with some management shit," Rusty told him, waving one hand vaguely around at the room they were in. "Someone's trying to get out of paying their bill. Damn cheapskates, I swear."

"Celebrities are jackasses," Danny called after him as Rusty headed out of the room. Once he heard the sound of the door to the suite closing behind Rusty, Danny got up and pulled on some clothes. 

The suite was still fairly clean, which suggested that Rusty and Isabel hadn't been living there all that long. There were a couple of boxes in the corner of the bedroom and Danny could see some garment bags hanging in the closet. Rusty's things were on the top of one of the dressers and Danny looked through them, recognizing a keychain Rusty had bought in Reno and a watch he'd found in a pawn shop when they were tracking down an old friend who'd screwed them. Also on the dresser was a lighter Danny had given Rusty as a joke on his 21st birthday. It was a cheap piece of crap printed with a playing card back on one side and the ace of spades on the other. By all rights, it should have fallen apart years ago, but here it was. 

Danny picked up the lighter and flicked it, then extinguished the flame. Still worked too. You had to give it to Rusty, he didn't usually let on that he was sentimental, but he had a soft spot for the kitchy things in life. It would be easy to pass it off as Rusty just liking crap, but he didn't. He liked crap that had meaning.

"Nothing worth stealing," Rusty pointed out as he walked back into the bedroom. "Unless you looked in the sock drawer."

"All you've got in there is socks and snowglobes," Danny told him. "So what's the plan for this week? Are we spending the whole time overseeing the hotel?"

Rusty threw him a look and Danny laughed.

"Okay, fine. What about a trip to Vegas?"

Rusty was still giving him that look.

"What? It's home!" Danny said. 

Rusty's look did not falter.

"Fine. No Vegas. What about Reno?"

Rusty's look became even more dismissive.

"No Reno." Danny sighed. "We could always just go bilk some CW kids out of their hard earned cash."

"Never again," Rusty muttered.

"What about wine, then?" Danny asked, looking over at Rusty and smiling.

"I thought we were putting that on the list?"

"We were. We are. I was thinking more along the lines of seeing if we could manage to put our hands on something rare and hard to find without necessarily paying for it."

Rusty considered that for a while. They both considered that for a while. Danny knew he had Rusty's attention when neither of them spoke for a full five minutes while consideration was under way.

"I think I know just the asshole to part it from," Rusty said eventually. "Keeps the wine as a status symbol. He'll never drink it. He'll never even notice it's gone. Best part? Pretty sure we can keep this a two man job."

Danny grinned at him. "Hey, just our luck there's exactly two of us."

* * *

After two days of planning, it turned out that the wine cellar Rusty knew about had recently been given a security overhaul following an insurance inventory. And it turned out that the owner was in town unexpectedly. And it furthermore turned out that he was throwing a party when Rusty and Danny arrived on the grounds, ready to break into the wine cellar and make off with approximately $20,000 worth of wine that might well taste like vinegar by now.

Fortunately for Danny and Rusty, it was a rather large party, full of people the host only barely knew. Also fortunately for Danny and Rusty, they had worn suits over their normal breaking-and-entering clothes, because it was a nice neighborhood and it was a lot easier to convince the authorities you were merely lost if you were wearing a decent suit than if you were dressed to blend in with the shadows. 

"I think you made a good impression on him," Rusty commented as they made their way off the property via a back path that would lead them past the pool house where they'd stashed two bottles of wine earlier in the evening.

"If I'd had to spend any longer listening to him pontificate on the notes of that glass of swill he was holding, I would have made an entirely different impression," Danny said, carefully keeping an eye out for anyone else out on the grounds. "South side of the vineyard, my ass."

"That's what we grabbed, right? Two bottles of swill?"

"Yes, that's precisely what we grabbed," Danny said.

Certain that they were unobserved, Danny slipped in through the back door of the pool house and retrieved their ill-gotten wine. Truth be told, the party had been the perfect cover. They hadn't even really had to break into the wine cellar. Well, not much. They'd only had to break into the locked portion. And the locked racks. And then place dummy bottles in place of the two they'd taken. And then re-lock everything and stash the stolen bottles and blend back in with the crowd and mingle long enough to be utterly inconspicuous.

"You know, this would be easier if it was cold enough for overcoats," Danny pointed out as they wrapped the bottles up and tucked them into a bulky laptop bag that Rusty then slung over his shoulder.

"Anyone asks, I've got a tech startup with a Kickstarter launching in a month," Rusty said as they hurried - casually - to their car. "I just can't leave home without my laptop. And tablet. And three phones. And about a billion cables."

"Sure," Danny agreed. "Let's go."

Back at the hotel, they took out the two bottles and set them on the coffee table, then sat down on the couch and looked at them.

"So, I'm thinking, we might have an in with a wine connoisseur now. Or at least a self-styled wine connoisseur," Danny pointed out. 

"That we do," Rusty agreed. He got up and went into the kitchen, then returned with a corkscrew and two wine glasses. "I'll work on cultivating that. See if I can get invited to more parties."

"However will you cope," Danny asked, picking one of the bottles and holding it out to Rusty.

"No, leave that one for Isabel," Rusty said. So Danny set it down and took the other one.

Rusty uncorked the wine and poured it. They each took a glass and sat back. It was exquisite, delicious. And he was about 99% sure they could replicate it if they wanted and sell it to the highest bidder. Which made it perfect.


End file.
